Making and getting lots of phone calls was a raison d’etre for millions of Millennial girls in particular, but once we hit our thirties, the phone became the equivalent of junk mail. Did this have unintended consequences?
Millennials, especially those of us on the older end who were born in Reagan’s second term, are a generation of many dualities. Duality comes up in so much of my work and I always thought it was just because of a vast amount of personal circumstances and life events.
But it turns out my entire generation is riddled with them. Our lives have been colored by hope and doom alike, and we watched technology and communications advance at different speeds.
We saw the end of the old world and the last decade of relative stability and prosperity for many Americans…
Sex and the City’s Samantha Jones is treated by the media crit community as this virtually satirical character who’s been touted as unrealistic by viewers, particularly younger viewers coming across the show for the first time. But as my forties loom closer, I find her MORE realistic and relatable than ever before.
I distinctly recall this conversation I had with this guy I slept with after a punk show in 2010.
“So, what’s your plans?” This was the exact conversation I wanted to avoid. I somehow woke up in some bumblefuck place in Suffolk County, a ways off from my safe and solitary dumpy domicile in The Bronx. Being a grad student broker than Mike Pence after Biden’s inauguration, and the fact that it would take a couple years before rideshare apps would become de rigeur, I unfortunately had to depend on this lamentable one-shot deal for a ride back to the…
This movie is WAY darker than later generations were led to believe it was and while it says a great deal about Boomer nihilism of the era, it says even more about rape culture.
Content Warning: As the title implies, there is discussion of sexual violence in this piece. Reader discretion is advised. And spoilers abound if you’ve never seen this classic film.
Throughout my childhood in the 1990s, I’d seen various representations of and references to Saturday Night Fever and its iconic poster. My mother’s trashy tabloids were often topped with headlines about Saturday Night Fever reunions accompanied by recent photos of John Travolta juxtaposed to stills of him strutting his stuff at 2001 Odyssey in the 1977 film. …
Check yourselves and stop yelling at childfree women about how we’re going to be so sad, alone, and regretting it at 50 when this seems to be projection. Oh, and less than 1% of female sterilization patients ever look to reverse the procedure!
Dear Modern Parent,
Your content keeps popping up in my Medium feed despite my adamantly not wanting kids. I don’t know why, but I guess it’s because there’s a lot of pandemic-related content tying with parenting plus it’s an inherently feminist issue so I presume that’s why Medium’s algorithmic gremlins keep sending you my way. I’m not the intended audience, but those titles definitely make me want to click.
Thing is, those titles confirm something I’ve suspected a long time and that I feel is a grave injustice: more people regret having children than NOT having them.
Yet it’s only childfree people, namely women, who seem to bear any brunt of “BUT YOU’LL REGRET IT!!!” upon stating and affirming their reproductive choices.
Respectability politics is a trap.
Being modest doesn't stop men from sexualizing us. Neither does abstaining from casual sex. They're always going to find a way to say "we asked for it".
Modesty and curling inwards on ourselves does not stop patriarchy.
It's a trap: attempts to appease the oppressors, who will NEVER be pleased, only make the oppressed fight among ourselves.
I miss being at live shows so much, and am officially sick of sitting in front of my computer.
Day after day, the invites pile up in my personal and business inboxes alongside the infinite stream that is my Twitter feed.
Come to the virtual version of this conference you otherwise would’ve traveled to attend!
Join this Twitch stream!
There’s an important civic organizing meeting on Zoom, please RSVP!
Come check out my friend’s Discord server!
I haven’t made it to a single thing after April 2020. Regardless of whether I RSVP’d or not.
And let me be clear, I feel bad about it.
I want to participate in the causes I care about, like amphibian conservation and leftist fiscal policy advocacy, plus there’s a great deal of important electoral work I should get involved at the…
The art one makes, subcultures and scenes they participate in, and even sexual kinks do not make one an abuser by default or more likely to engage in abusive behavior. In fact, these aspects can and have been used to unfairly castigate or even fetishize people.
There is much discourse about Marilyn Manson’s long history of sexual abuse in the entertainment and media worlds and his own fans.
Countless writers delved into his history better than I could, I’d highly recommend this piece by Shannon Ashley about how he basically admitted he was a serial abuser for decades and no one did anything about it. It was just swept under the red carpet. Let’s face it, CAA suddenly dropping him had more to do with covering their asses than actually doing justice to the numerous women who’ve come forward in addition to Evan Rachel Wood.
And…
Sex and the City was groundbreaking at the turn of the millennium and hasn’t aged well in many respects, but there’s a buried lede in criticisms about the show.
So there’s a Sex and the City reboot coming sans the one character who was actually sexually adventurous compared to the rest of the main cast.
As one would expect, the take machine has been a-churning about reboot culture, the numerous flaws in the show’s original run, and how it both revolutionized the way women discussed sex yet was still quite conservative. I mean, come on: Carrie Bradshaw addressed any kind of sexual activity that wasn’t hetero and vanilla with the same statecraft as The Iron Sheik doling out some Monday Motivation on Twitter.
But as someone who’s now been…
While it’s been hard to sacrifice seeing family and friends plus travel and events, being by yourself for this long DOES have its perks.
Ever since lockdown began that fateful day 10 months ago, this lost year has had millions of us feeling lonely, anguished, frustrated, angry, grieving, you name it. And you got every right to feel that way.
When it comes to how single people, particularly single people living alone, are dealing with the pandemic, we’re often discussed in this piteous manner. …
Even if being single or taken is a binary, the conditions and individual wants and needs surrounding one’s relationship status are far from a simple either-or.
In a world where we have seemingly endless options for everything from sandwiches to gender expression, single women [namely, cisgender women who primarily date men] seem to be given just two of them when it comes to relationship status: you’re either in this constant state of despondence and desperation as a result of not having a permanent guy in your life, or YAS QUEEN you don’t ever need a man at all, you never want to bother with that!
If you’re happy and single, so many people take it to mean that you don’t want a relationship. If you’re unhappy…
